A Collective Blooming

By Joe Lightfoot

Somewhere along the way, we lost touch with each other. And unless we rediscover the communal bonds that define us as human beings, then we face the very real prospect of an increasingly dystopian future.

 

In A Collective Blooming, Joe Lightfoot deconstructs the dominant stories of the day and puts forward a bold new narrative of community focused transformation. He introduces the Conscious Change Collective, a whole new kind of mutual aid community and invites you to join the compassionate wave of change that is gaining momentum all around the world. It's a book that not only describes the inner journey towards becoming a true Community Creature, but also offers up the practical steps for how to get there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Communitas
• Release date: Sep 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393196532

Book preview

Joe Lightfoot

A Collective Blooming

The Rise Of The Mutual Aid Community

Copyright © 2020 by Joe Lightfoot

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

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Contents

An Introduction: This Book In A Nutshell

I. WICKED PROBLEMS: OUR CALL TO ADVENTURE

1. The Age Of Alienation: Becoming Hyper-Individuals

2. And Then It Collapsed: Civilisation As The Ultimate Pyramid Scheme

II. EVOLVING OUR NARRATIVE: THE STORIES THAT WILL SHAPE OUR WORLD

3. The Grandest Tale: Our One True Superpower

4. The Last Gasps Of Neoliberalism

5. Flirting With The F Word: The Radical Populist Resurgence

6. What Lies Beneath: The Hungry Ghosts Of Hollow Materialism

7. The Age Of Algorithms: A Transhumanist’s Wet Dream

8. A Time Of Togetherness: An Emergent Consensus

9. A Collective Blooming: Towards The Compassionate Global Village

III. IMAGINING THE CONSCIOUS CHANGE COLLECTIVE

10. The Story Of Us: A Thought Experiment

11. Find The Others: Start A Collective

12. Coming Home: The Many Benefits Of Getting Collective

13. The 2020’s: A Perfect Storm For A Collective Emergence

14. The Who: Not Just For Millennials

15. Where It Can Take Us: Collective Dreams Of Tomorrow

IV. THE PATH OF TRANSFORMATION: FINDING OUR WAY BACK TO COMMUNITY

16. Tawai: Modernity’s Missing Secret Sauce

17. The Ultimate Petri Dish: Create Your Own Culture

18. Mirrored & Seen: The Wisdom Of 100 Eyes

19. Enter The Dojo: Becoming A Community Creature

20. Collective Incubation: Finding Your Ikigai

21. Atlas Squared: Easing The Weight Of The World

22. Trust Networks: The One True Currency

23. In Conclusion: Let The Experiment Begin

Appendix I. The Finer Details: The FAQ’s Of Getting Collective

Appendix II. Where To Learn More

Appendix III. Collective Bonding Projects

Notes

About the Author

An Introduction: This Book In A Nutshell

This is a bite sized book about rediscovering each other. It explores how cultivating new types of community can bring untold fulfilment into our lives, and puts forward the idea that a globally synchronised burst of grass roots community engagement may have the potential to radically transform our inner and outer worlds.

The book is composed of four parts:

Part I briefly explores the nature of our modern day alienation and suggests that without major structural changes our whole civilisation may soon be headed for collapse.

Part II outlines the grand overarching narratives that helped bring us to this point, and explores some of the alternatives that are emerging in response.

Part III introduces the idea of the Conscious Change Collective, a new form of mutual aid community that is intended to increase our felt sense of belonging, create new opportunities for us to give and receive support and empower us to become more effective agents of change. This section of the book also explores how such Collectives may be the perfect vehicles to prototype and live out the new kinds of societal narratives that are starting to emerge.

And finally, Part IV explores the many personal benefits, challenges and opportunities that await us as individuals when we begin to participate in such mutual aid communities.

So let’s begin by first taking a brief look at one of the most insidious threats that we currently face as a species, that of our gradual descent into a culture of Alienated Hyper-individuality.

I

Wicked Problems: Our Call to Adventure

There is a pattern to the universe and everything in it, and there are knowledge systems and traditions that follow this pattern to maintain balance, to keep the temptations of narcissism in check. But recent traditions have emerged that break down creation systems like a virus, infecting complex patterns with artificial simplicity, exercising a civilising control over what some see as chaos. Tyson Yunkaporta¹

1

The Age Of Alienation: Becoming Hyper-Individuals

‘All of us are pretty good at carrying the secret of our own loneliness’ Carl Rogers²

Somewhere along the way, we lost touch with each other. After millions of years of evolution in tight knit tribal communities, in the blink of an historical eyelid we became a society of alienated hyper-individuals. In the words of Waldo Noesta ‘a society of hyper-individualists no longer functions like a single organism, but as an aggregate of parts each looking out for its own interests, cooperating only as they see fit as a means to their own private ends’.³ In other words, a society soon destined for decline and the cracks are already showing.

In the Global North we have less close friends we can confide in and live further apart from our family members than ever before.⁴,⁵ Our elders are left stranded in social isolation and our youth feels increasingly disconnected and alone⁶. Worst of all is that we now know such conditions are incredibly detrimental to our physical and mental health, with recent studies showing that loneliness and isolation can result in up to a 50% increase in the likelihood of a premature death.⁷ From the increasing time we spend at work, to the hours spent navigating traffic in our burgeoning cities, we’ve engineered a system that literally drives us away from each other and towards an early grave.

The Japanese phenomena of Kodokushi illustrates just how alienated we’ve become. It describes an increasing trend of people dying alone and not being discovered for extended periods of time. In the year 2000, a man’s corpse was found a full three years after he’d died,⁸ and only then because his savings account had been automatically emptied by his bank and he could no longer cover the cost of his rent. He died alone, and had no one in his life close enough to wonder whether or not he was still alive.

Such statistics and stories illustrate that our modern way of life is slowly eroding the threads of human connection that hold us together. But we weren’t always so alienated from each other, as Carl Sagan explains ‘most of human history was spent in hunter-gatherer communities. And in these kinds of communities today—there aren’t many of them—you find a degree of cooperativeness, an absence of alienation that is unheard of in modern society. To ignore our social heredity is a serious mistake. There is a human capacity for good-natured cooperation that is simply not encouraged in modern society. That must change.’⁹ But before exploring what such change might look like, let’s first take a look at what is likely to happen to our civilisation if we continue down the road we’re currently on.

2

And Then It Collapsed: Civilisation As The Ultimate Pyramid Scheme

There is a growing consensus in academia that unless we make rapid, radical and far reaching changes to our way of life, then there’s a good chance that at some point in the decades to come our entire civilisation may simply collapse.¹⁰ We not only face the prospect of climate breakdown, the threat of ongoing pandemics and the economic hardship that will follow, but also a combination of rapid biodiversity loss, increasingly vast inequalities in the distribution of wealth, widespread oppression of minority groups, rapid technological disruptions to our economic systems, the ever present threat of nuclear war and the increasing likelihood of a series of global food shortages. Just to name a few.

Though in many ways this high level of threat is nothing new, as our species has a long and colourful history of forming societal structures that have buckled under the weight of their own increasing levels of prosperity, and the complicatedness that tends to come with it. As the historian Ronald Wright explains ‘Civilizations…feed on their local ecology until it is degraded, thriving only while they grow. When they can no longer expand, they fall victim to their own success. Civilization is a